PROJECT TITLE :

Visualization-by-Sketching: An Artist's Interface for Creating Multivariate Time-Varying Data Visualizations

ABSTRACT:

We tend to gift Visualization-by-Sketching, an instantaneous-manipulation user interface for designing new data visualizations. The goals are twofold: Initial, build the process of creating real, animated, information-driven visualizations of advanced info more accessible to artists, graphic designers, and different visual experts with ancient, non-technical training. Second, support and enhance the role of human creativity in visualization style, enabling visual experimentation and workflows similar to what is attainable with ancient artistic media. The approach is to conceive of visualization style as a combination of processes that are already closely linked with visual creativity: sketching, digital painting, image editing, and reacting to exemplars. Rather than studying and tweaking low-level algorithms and their parameters, designers create new visualizations by painting directly on high of a digital data canvas, sketching data glyphs, and arranging and mixing along multiple layers of animated 2D graphics. This requires new algorithms and techniques to interpret painterly user input relative to information “below” the canvas, balance artistic freedom with the need to supply correct data visualizations, and interactively explore massive (e.g., terabyte-sized) multivariate datasets. Results demonstrate a variety of multivariate knowledge visualization techniques can be rapidly recreated using the interface. A lot of importantly, results and feedback from artists support the potential for interfaces in this style to attract new, artistic users to the challenging task of designing more effective knowledge visualizations and to help these users keep “in the creative zone” as they work.